Revive Your Old 8-Bit NES With These Brand-New Games

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Revive Your Old 8-Bit NES With These Brand-New Games

Photo: Alex Washburn/Wired

On Dec. 10, 1994, Nintendo released the final official game for its Entertainment System, a puzzle game called Wario's Woods. And that was all she wrote: After a nine-year run, the groundbreaking 8-bit game console's time had expired, and gamers would move on to more technologically adept hardware.

But some fans, whether too in love with the pixelated aesthetic or the creative constraints of limited hardware, don't want to move on. So they devote themselves to learning the ins and outs of the Ricoh 6502 processor, practice their pixel art and create games that could have been on the shelves in the early '90s. Then they go the extra mile and produce cartridges, boxes and manuals and sell their creations to like-minded fans who want new content for their old, old machines.

While the earliest Nintendo Entertainment System "homebrew" games were rather simple, the latest creations are significantly more polished. Here are three new NES games you can buy now.

Battle Kid 2: Mountain of Torment
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Battle Kid 2 is the only NES homebrew game so far that could actually be called "anticipated." The first game, a brutally difficult action game in the vein of Mega Man, was the first latter-day game for NES that garnered attention from outside the niche hobbyists.

This sequel is a little more approachable, with selectable difficulty levels. "Easy" mode gives you three hit points instead of just one, making the game much more forgiving but still very hard. You do have infinite lives, so the goal is to try the difficult jumping and shooting challenges over and over until you perfect the timing. Getting past the screen pictured at right took me an hour. Gorgeous graphics and catchy chiptunes make Battle Kid 2 a pleasant experience even when you're getting your three pixels of ass handed to you.

To the best of my knowledge, Assimilate is the best Nintendo game about anal probes. Probably the only one. Not that any of that happens on screen. It's more implied. As a flying saucer, you hover over a city, scooping up its citizens for nefarious purposes.

Once they're in your ship, some devious brainwashing scheme is carried out on them while you dodge the missiles and other such projectiles that the ungrateful people of Earth are lobbing at you. If you choose a more efficacious method of assimilation, it takes longer. So you have to choose between speed and efficiency. As you continue through the game, you'll find funny cinematics and epic boss battles. Assimilate starts slow and easy, but the challenge and the fun do pick up.

This side-scrolling action game, something like Castlevania with cats, is a little easier than Battle Kid but still challenging, mostly because it follows in the classic NES action game tradition of sending enemies flying at you from offscreen at odd angles that are deliberately hard to parry.

Nomolos is the least polished of these three new games, with floaty controls and simple artwork. That said, it's flawed in the exact same ways that classic 8-bit games were flawed. The fact that it feels exactly like playing a budget game from 1993 (I could see THQ releasing this with some random Saturday morning cartoon license) is an interesting accomplishment in creative anachronism, in and of itself.